I give a place to the following pages, because, for all the difference
of form, this essay is of the same sort, has had the same kind of
origin, as the so seemingly incongruous studies with which it is bound
up. For this also is the rough putting together of notes made at
various times and in various phases of study; it is a series of
self-questionings and answers, of problems, perhaps only half-formulated
and half-solved, which have arisen round one man, one artist, one art
philosophy, even as in the adjoining essays they have arisen around some
one statue, or song, or picture; self-questionings and problems, these
present ones, not of aesthetic right and wrong suggested by a given work
of art, but of moral fitness and unfitness suggested by the doubts, the
divisions, the mistakes, by the comprehension (or, if you prefer, the
misapprehension) of the conscience of perhaps the greatest and strangest
artist of our days.
* * * * *
John Ruskin stands quite isolated among writers on art. His truths and
his errors are alike of a far higher sort than the truths and errors of
his fellow-workers: they are truths and errors not of mere fact, nor of
mere reasoning, but of tendency, of moral attitude; and his philosophy
is of far greater importance than any other system of aesthetics,
because it is not the philosophy of the genius, evolution or meaning
of any art or of all art, but the philosophy of the legitimacy or
illegitimacy of all and every art. In the case of every other writer
on art the evils due to a false system are, in proportion to the great
interests of our lives and of the life around, but very paltry evils:
the evils of misconceiving the relations between various masters and
various schools, and the causes of various artistic phenomena; the evils
of misappreciating a work or a form of art, of preferring an inferior
picture, or statue or piece of music, to a superior one; the evils of
buying fluttering St. Theresas of Bernini rather than noble goddesses
of Scopas; of ornamenting our houses with plaster dragons, grimacing
toothless masks, and meagre lines of lintel and clumsy agglomerations
of columns, rather than with the leaf and flower moulding, the noble
arches and dainty cornices of mediaeval art; the evils in short of not
understanding quite well or of not appreciating quite correctly. Very
important evils within the limited sphere of our artistic interests, and
which we must not neglect to eradicate; but evils such as cannot deeply
trouble our whole nature, or seriously damage our whole lives. Such is
the case with the aesthetic systems, with the truths and errors of men
like Winckelmann, Lessing, Hegel, or Taine; but it is not so with the
aesthetic system of Ruskin. For the theories of all other writers on
art deal only with the meaning and value of one work or school of art
compared with another work or school; they deal only with the question
how much of our liking or disliking should we give to this art or to
that; they are all true or false within the region allotted to art. But
the theories of Ruskin deal with the comparative importance of artistic
concerns and the other concerns of our lives: they deal with the
problem, how much of our thoughts and our energies we have a right to
give to art, and for what reasons we may give any portion of them: it
deals with the question of the legitimacy not of one kind of artistic
enjoyment more than another, but of the enjoyment of art at all.
The question may at first sight seem futile from its very magnitude:
unnecessary because it has so long been answered. In the first moment
many of us may answer with contempt that the thinking men and women of
to-day are not ascetics of the Middle Ages, nor utilitarians of the 18th
century, nor Scotch Calvinists, that they should require to be taught
that beauty is neither sinful nor useless, that enjoyment of art is not
foul self-indulgence nor childish pastime. And so at first it seems. The
thinking men and women of our day are not any of these things, and do
not require to be answered these questions. But though these scruples
and doubts no longer trouble us, we, in our nineteenth century, are yet
not entirely at peace in our hearts. For, just in proportion as the old
religious faith is dying out, we are feeling the necessity to create a
new; as the old vocations of belief are becoming fewer and further
between, the new vocations of duty are becoming commoner; as the old
restrictions of the written law are melting away, so there appears
the new restriction of the unwritten law, the law of our emancipated
conscience; and the less we go to our priests, the more do we go to our
own inner selves to know what we may do and what we should sacrifice:
with our daily growing liberty, grows and must grow, to all the nobler
among us, our responsibility. Nay, the more we realise that we have but
this one brief life wherein to act and to expiate, the more earnestly do
we ask ourselves to what use we should put the little that is vouchsafed
us. And thus it comes to pass that there exist among us many who, seeing
the evil around them, seeing the infinitude of falsehood which requires
to be dispelled and of pain which requires to be alleviated, and of
injustice which requires to be destroyed, must occasionally pause and
ask themselves what right they have to give all, or any, of their
limited time and thought and energy to the mere enjoyment of the
beautiful, when there exists on all sides evil which it seems to require
unlimited effort to quell. Many there must be, and every day more, who
are harried by their love of art and their sense of duty, who daily ask
themselves the question which first arose, nearly forty years ago, in
the mind of John Ruskin; and which, settled by false answers, has
recurred to him ever and anon, and has shaken and shattered the very
system which was intended to answer it for ever.
John Ruskin has been endowed as have been very few men as an artist, a
critic, and a moralist; in the immense chaotic mass, the constantly
altered and constantly propped up ruins of an impossible system, which
constitute the bulk of his writings, he has taught us more of the subtle
reasons of art, he has reproduced with his pen more of the beauty of
physical nature, and he has made us feel more profoundly the beauty of
moral nature, than has, perhaps, been done separately by any critic,
or artist, or moralist of his day. He has possessed within himself
two very perfect characters, has been fitted out for two very noble
missions:--the creation of beauty and the destruction of evil; and of
these two halves each has been warped; of these two missions each has
been hampered; warped and hampered by the very nobility of the man's
nature: by his obstinate refusal to compromise with the reality of
things, by his perpetual resistance to the evidence of his reason, by
his heroic and lamentable clinging to his own belief in harmony where
there is discord, in perfection where there is imperfection. There are
natures which cannot be coldly or resignedly reasonable, which, despite
all possible demonstration, cannot accept evil as a necessity and
injustice as a fact; which must believe their own heart rather than
their own reason; and when we meet such natures, we in our cold wisdom
must look upon them with pity, perhaps, and regret, but with admiration
and awe and envy. Such a nature is that of John Ruskin. He belongs, it
is true, to a generation which is rapidly passing away; he is the almost
isolated champion of creeds and ideas which have ceased even to be
discussed among the thinking part of our nation; he is a believer
not only in Good and in God, but in Christianity, in the Bible, in
Protestantism; he is, in many respects, a man left far behind by the
current of modern thought; but he is, nevertheless, and unconsciously,
perhaps, to himself, the greatest representative of the highly developed
and conflicting ethical and aesthetical nature which is becoming more
common in proportion as men are taking to think and feel for themselves;
his is the greatest example of the strange battles and compromises which
are daily taking place between our moral and our artistic halves; and
the history of his aspirations and his errors is the type of the inner
history of many a humbler thinker and humbler artist around us.
When, nearly forty years ago, Ruskin first came before the world with
the wonderful book--wonderful in sustained argument and description,
and in obscure, half crazy, half prophetic utterances--called _Modern
Painters_, it was felt that a totally new power had entered the region
of artistic analysis. It was not the subtle sympathy with line and
curve, with leaf and moulding, nor the wondrous power of reproducing
with mere words the depths of sky and sea, the radiancies of light and
the flame and smoulder of cloud; it was not his critical insight nor
his artistic faculty which drew to him at once the souls of a public so
different, in its universality, from the small eclectic bands which
surround other aestheticians; it was the feeling, in all who read his
books, that this man was giving a soul to the skies and seas; that he
was breathing human feeling into every carved stone and painted canvas;
that he was bidding capital and mosaic, nay, every rudest ornament hewn
by the humblest workman, to speak to men with the voice of their own
heart; that for the first time there had been brought into the serene
and egotistic world of art the passion, the love, and the wrath of
righteousness. He came into it as an apostle and a reformer, but as
an apostle and a reformer strangely different from Winckelmann and
Schlegel, from Lessing and Goethe. For, while attacking the architecture
of Palladio and the painting of Salvator Rosa; while expounding the
landscapes of Turner and the churches of Verona, he was not merely
demolishing false classicism and false realism, not merely vindicating
a neglected artist or a wronged school: he was come to sweep usurping
evil out of the kingdom of art, and to reinstate as its sole sovereign
no human craftsman, but God himself.
God or Good: for to Ruskin the two words have but one meaning. God and
Good must receive the whole domain of art; it must become the holy of
holies, the temple and citadel of righteousness. To do this was the
avowed mission of this strange successor, haughty and humble, and tender
and wrathful, of the pagan Winckelmann, of the coldly serene Goethe. How
came John Ruskin by this mission, or why should his mission differ so
completely from that of all his fellows? Why should he insist upon the
necessity of morally sanctifying art, instead of merely aesthetically
reforming it? Why was it not enough for him that artistic pleasure
should be innocent, without trying to make it holy? Because, for
Ruskin's nature, compounded of artist and moralist, artistic engagement
was a moral danger, a distraction from his duty--for Ruskin was not the
mere artist, who, powerless outside his art, may, because he can only,
give his whole energies to it; he was not the mere moralist who,
indifferent to art, can give it a passing glance without interrupting
for a moment his work of good; he felt himself endowed to struggle for
righteousness and bound to do so, and he felt himself also irresistibly
attracted by mere beauty. To the moral nature of the man this mere
beauty, which threatened to absorb his existence, became positively
sinful; while he knew that evil was raging without requiring all his
energies to quell it, every minute, every thought diverted from the
cause of good was so much gain for the cause of evil; innocence, mere
negative good, there could not be, as long as there remained positive
evil. Thus it appeared to Ruskin. This strange knight-errant of
righteousness, conscious of his heaven endowed strength, felt that
during every half-hour of delay in the Armida's garden of art, new
rootlets were being put forth, new leaves were being unfolded by the
enchanted forest of error which overshadowed and poisoned the earth,
and which it was his work to hew and burn down; that every moment of
reluctant farewell from the weird witch of beauty meant a fresh outrage,
an additional defiling of the holy of holies to rescue which he had
received his strong muscle and his sharp weapons. Thus, refusing to
divide his time and thoughts between his moral work and his artistic,
Ruskin must absolutely and completely abandon the latter; if art seemed
to him not merely a waste of power, but an absolute danger for his
nobler side, there evidently was no alternative but to abjure it for
ever. But a man cannot thus abandon his own field, abjure the work for
which he is specially fitted; he may mortify, and mutilate and imprison
his body, but he cannot mortify or mutilate his mind, he cannot imprison
his thoughts. John Ruskin was drawn irresistibly towards art because he
was specially organised for it. The impossible cannot be done: nature
must find a vent, and the artistic half of Ruskin's mind found its way
of eluding the apparently insoluble difficulty: his desire reasoned, and
his desire was persuaded. A revelation came to him: he was neither to
compromise with sin nor to renounce his own nature. For it struck him
suddenly that this irresistible craving for the beautiful, which he
would have silenced as a temptation of evil, was in reality the call
to his mission; that this domain of art, which he had felt bound to
abandon, was in reality the destined field for his moral combats,
the realm which he must reconquer for God and for Good. Ruskin had
considered art as sinful as long as it was only negatively innocent: by
the strange logic of desire he made it positively righteous, actively
holy; what he had been afraid to touch, he suddenly perceived that he
was commanded to handle. He had sought for a solution of his own doubts,
and the solution was the very gospel which he was to preach to others;
the truth which had saved him was the truth which he must proclaim. And
that truth, which had ended Ruskin's own scruples, was that the basis of
art is moral; that art cannot be merely pleasant or unpleasant, but must
be lawful or unlawful, that every legitimate artistic enjoyment is due
to the perception of moral propriety, that every artistic excellence is
a moral virtue, every artistic fault is a moral vice; that noble art can
spring only from noble feeling, that the whole system of the beautiful
is a system of moral emotions, moral selections, and moral appreciation;
and that the aim and end of art is the expression of man's obedience to
God's will, and of his recognition of God's goodness.
Such was the solution of Ruskin's scruples respecting his right of
giving to art the time and energies he might have given to moral
improvement; and such the aesthetical creed which he felt bound, by
conviction and by the necessity of self-justification, to develop into
a system and to apply to every single case. The notion of making beauty
not merely a vague emanation from the divinity, as in the old platonic
philosophies, but a direct result, an infallible concomitant of moral
excellence; of making the physical the mere reflexion of the moral, is
indeed a very beautiful and noble idea; but it is a false idea. For--and
this is one of the points which Ruskin will not admit--the true state
of things is by no means always the noblest or the most beautiful; our
longing for ineffable harmony is no proof that such harmony exists: the
phantom of perfection which hovers before us is often not the mirage
of some distant reality, but a mere vain shadow projected by our own
desires, which we must follow, but may never obtain. In the soul of all
of us exists, oftenest fragmentary and blurred, a plan of harmony and
perfection which must serve us as guide in our workings, in our altering
and rebuilding of things; but we must not expect that with this plan
should coincide the actual arrangements of nature; we must beware lest
we use as a map of the earth into which we have been created the map of
the heaven which we seek to create; for we shall find that the ways are
different, we shall go astray bewildered and in bitterness, we shall sit
down in despair in this country which is evil where it should have been
good, arid where it should have been fruitful, and we shall uselessly
weep or rage until all the time for our journeyings and workings is
over, and death has come to ask how much we have done. Sin and Pain
and Injustice are realities, and what is worse, they are necessities:
they are not despite Nature, but through Nature; destructive forces
perhaps, but which Nature requires for her endless work of construction;
punished perhaps in the individual wretch devoted to them, but ordered
nevertheless by that same punishing power which requires them. And worse
still, evil and good are not opponents, they are not for ever destroying
each other's work, for ever marshalled in battle against each other;
they are combined though hostile, used in the same great work of action
and reaction: together they build and destroy, together they are knit in
closest and most twisted bonds of cause and effect; bonds so close, so
inextricably crossed and recrossed that severing one of them, tearing
and cutting them asunder, it seems as if the whole universe would crash
down upon us. In this world of reality where evil leads to good and
life to death; where harmonies are imperfect, there is no unvarying
correspondence between things, no necessary genesis of good from good,
and evil from evil. There is much conflict and much isolation. And thus
the world of the physically beautiful is isolated from the world of the
morally excellent: there is sometimes correspondence between them, and
sometimes conflict, but both accidental and due to no inner affinity,
but only to exterior causes: most often there is no relation at all. For
the qualities of right and wrong, and of beautiful and ugly, and our
perceptions of them, belong to different parts of our being, even as
to a yet different part of our being belong our perception of true and
false, that is, of existing and non-existing. A true thing need by no
means be a good or a beautiful thing: that generations of men are doomed
to sin and misery is no good fact; that millions of putrifying bodies
lie beneath the ground is no beautiful fact, but both are nevertheless
true facts, true with that truth of which science, had it perception of
good and of beauty as well as mere perception of truth, should say, "I
recognize, but I shudder"--And thus also is it with the good and the
beautiful: they have no connection except that, each in its kingdom, is
the best, the desirable, that for which we should all strive, that for
which the whole of nature, despite its inextricable evils, seems to
crave and to struggle. A pure state of soul is like a pure state of
body: a morbid craving is like a disease; a noble moral attitude is like
a noble physical attitude: moral excellence and physical beauty are both
the healthy, the perfect; but they are the healthy, the perfect, in two
totally different halves of nature, and we perceive and judge them by
totally different organisms. Whence our moral instincts have come, or
how they ever entered into the scheme of a world in which there is so
much to shock them; how the preference for the good of others was ever
evolved out of the preference for the good of self is a question most
speedily solved by the men of science who seek the reasons why Christ is
good and the thinned gold-leaved poplars by the river are beautiful, in
the living nerves of ripped-up beasts; this much is evident that moral
instinct judges that part of actions which is neither to be felt with
our hands, nor to be seen with our eyes, nor to be tasted or heard or
smelt: it judges and finds good or evil certain qualities or combinations
of qualities which do not materially exist: things which though they
have as real an existence as anything which can be tasted or sniffed or
fingered, have yet a purely intellectual existence, can be found only by
those mysterious senses which, even as touch and hearing, and smell and
taste and sight, put us in communication with the physical world outside
us, put us far more wonderfully in communication with the moral world
within us. The qualities constituting physical beauty, on the other
hand, are, to a large extent at least, perceived by our physical senses:
there is indeed a point where the mere nerve sensations no longer serve
to explain aesthetical likings or dislikings, where, on the other hand,
the addition of mere logical considerations of fitness seem insufficient
to account for phenomena, where, in short, we are forced to have
recourse to a very confused and at present untenable idea of inherited
habits and love of proportion, but it nevertheless remains evident that
physical beauty is a thing perceived through the physical senses and
concretely extant in the world around us. We say that a character is
morally good because certain actions or words reveal to us the existence
of certain tendencies and habits of feeling which (no matter how
instituted) satisfy and delight our moral nature, because there is
between these tendencies of feeling and our moral nature a mysterious
affinity, which may depend on nerve cells or on logical arguments,
but does not in the least resemble either. But when we say that a
tree is beautiful, it is because, in the first instance, its mere
sensation-giving qualities, taken separately, affect us agreeably in our
various physical parts: the colour stimulating or soothing our colour
nerves, the size, enabling our visual nerves to take in its shape
agreeably; its shadyness, which even as a mere suggestion, pleases
our tactile nerves, its rustle, which pleasantly moves our nerves of
hearing; and even if we admit that the perception that the tree as a
whole is beautiful, as distinguished from certain of its qualities being
agreeable, depends upon something higher and more recondite than mere
nerve tickle, even then it remains that whatever abstract instinct of
beauty we may possess, it is only through physical sensations that this
instinct is reached; and that a man born blind cannot perceive beauty
of colours nor a man born deaf beauty of sounds, simply because the
physical receptive organs of sight and sound are wanting. Thus, in
short, beauty is a physical quality, as goodness is a moral quality: and
if they are in a way equivalents, beauty being physical goodness, and
goodness moral beauty, it is exactly because each has a separate sphere
in which each respectively, represents the best. That beauty is in
itself physical, is a point which few have denied: that beautiful curves
and harmonies are moral qualities very few have asserted. But few have
as yet been willing to admit that beauty is a quality independent of
goodness, independent sometimes to the extent of hostility: that it is
as independent of moral excellence as is logical correctness. Yet thus
it is; and thus all of us must vaguely feel; all those who think, must
closely perceive it to be. There is no justice, no charity, no moral
excellence in physical beauty. It is a negative thing. If it refuses to
associate with evil, to dwell in the putrid corpse or in the face of the
murderer, it is because physical beauty is a concomitant of physical
purity and health, and decaying corpses are always unhealthy, while evil
souls nearly always leave ugly marks on the bodies: but the putrescent
corpse and the murderer's face are both ugly because they are physically
wrong, not because they are morally abominable. Beauty, in itself, is
neither morally good nor morally bad: it is aesthetically good, even as
virtue is neither aesthetically good nor aesthetically bad, but morally
good. Beauty is pure, complete, egotistic: it has no other value than
its being beautiful. This is a bitter thing to say, a cruel confession
on the part of one whose love and whose chief interest is the beautiful,
to make to himself: this that his beloved and much studied Beautiful,
which is his happiness and his study, has no moral value: that above
this superb and fascinating thing, there are things which are better,
nobler, more necessary, and for whose sake, in case of conflict, this
adored quality must be trampled under foot. A bitter confession; but the
truth is the truth, and must be admitted; to ourselves first of all. It
is, as we have said, one of the wicked anomalies of this world that the
true, the existing, is at variance with that which we should wish to
exist: we cannot replace with impunity the ugly, the cruel, the mean
truth by the charming, the generous fancy; if we do so, we must be
prepared to break with all truth, or to compromise with all falsehood:
we shall create an evil a hundredfold worse than the one we wished to
avoid. We are afraid of a truth which jars upon our sense of the morally
desirable: we invent and accept a lie, plausible and noble; and behold!
in a moment we are surrounded by a logical work of falsehood, which must
be for ever torn and for ever patched up if any portion of truth is to
enter.
Such has been the case with John Ruskin; he shrank from owning to
himself what we have just recognized, with reluctance, indeed, and
sorrow, that the beautiful to whose study and creation he was so
irresistibly drawn, had no moral value; that in the great battle between
good and evil, beauty remained neutral, passive, serenely egotistic.
It was necessary for him that beauty should be more than passively
innocent: he must make it actively holy. Only a moral meaning could make
art noble; and as, in the deep-rooted convictions of Ruskin, art was
noble, a moral meaning must be found. The whole of the philosophy of art
must be remodelled upon an ethical basis; a moral value must everywhere
sanction the artistic attraction. And thus Ruskin came to construct a
strange system of falsehood, in which moral motives applied to purely
physical actions, moral meanings given to the merely aesthetically
significant, moral consequences drawn from absolutely unethical
decisions; even the merest coincidences in historical and artistic
phenomena, nay, even in the mere growth of various sorts of plants,
nay, even the most ludicrously applied biblical texts, were all
dragged forward and combined into a wondrous legal summing-up for the
beatification of art; the sense of the impossibility of rationally
referring certain aesthetical phenomena to ethical causes producing in
this lucid and noble thinker a sort of frenzy, a wild impulse to solve
irrational questions by direct appeals for an oracular judgment of God,
to be sought for in the most trumpery coincidences of accidents; so that
the man who has understood most of the subtle reasons of artistic
beauty, who has grasped most completely the psychological causes of
great art and poor art, is often reduced to answer his perplexities
by a sort of aesthetico-moral key and bible divination, or heads-win
tails-lose, toss-up decision. The main pivots of Ruskin's system are,
however, but few: first, the assertion that all legitimate artistic
action is governed by moral considerations, is the direct putting in
practice of the commandments of God; and secondly, that all pleasure in
the beautiful is the act of appreciating the goodness and wisdom of God.
These two main theories completely balance one another; between them,
and with the occasional addition of mystic symbolism, they must explain
the whole question of artistic right and wrong. Now for Ruskin artistic
right and wrong is not only a very complex, but, in many respects,
a very fluctuating question; in order to see how complex and how
fluctuating, we must remember what Ruskin is, and what are his aims.
Ruskin is no ordinary aesthetician, interested in art only inasmuch as
it is a subject for thought, untroubled in the framing of histories,
psychological systems of art philosophy by any personal likings and
dislikings; Ruskin is essentially an artist, he thinks about art because
he feels about art, and his sole object is morally to justify his
artistic sympathies and aversions, morally to justify his caring about
art at all. With him the instinctive likings and dislikings are the
original motor, the system is there only for their sake. He cannot,
therefore, like Lessing, or Hegel, or Taine, quietly shove aside any
phenomenon of artistic preference which does not happen to fit into his
system; he could, like Hegel, assign an inferior rank to painting,
because painting has to fall into the category assigned to romantic,
that is to say, imperfect art; he could not, like Taine, deliberately
stigmatise music as a morbid art because it had arisen, according to
his theory, in a morbid state of society; with Ruskin everything must
finally yield to the testimony of his artistic sense: everything which
he likes must be legitimated, everything which he dislikes must be
condemned; and for this purpose the system of artistic morality must for
ever be altered, annotated, provided with endless saving-clauses, and
special cases. And all this the more especially as, in the course of his
studies, Ruskin frequently perceives that things which on superficial
acquaintance displeased him, are in reality delightful, in consequence
of which discovery a new legislation is required to annul their previous
condemnation and provide for their due honour. Thus, having conceived a
perhaps exaggerated aversion (due, in great part, to the injustice of
his adversaries) to the manner of representing the nature of certain
Dutch painters of the 17th century, Ruskin immediately formulated a
theory that minute imitation of nature was base and sinful; and when
he conceived a perhaps equally exaggerated admiration for the works of
certain extremely careful and even servile English painters of our own
times, he was forced to formulate an explanatory theory that minuteness
of work was conscientious, appreciative, and distinctly holy. Had he
been satisfied with mere artistic value, he need only have said that the
Dutch pictures were ugly, and the English pictures beautiful; but having
once established all artistic judgment upon an ethical basis, it became
urgent that he should invent a more or less casuistic reason, something
not unlike the _distinguo_ by means of which the Jesuit moralists
rendered innocent in their powerful penitents what they had declared
sinful in less privileged people, to explain that, under certain
circumstances, minute imitation was the result of insolence and apathy,
and in other cases the sign of humility and appreciation. Again, having
been instinctively impressed by the coldness and insipidity of the
schools of art which ostensibly refused to copy individual nature, and
professed to reproduce only the more important and essential character
of things, Ruskin annihilated these idealistic conventionalists by a
charge of impious contempt for the details of individual peculiarities
which God had been pleased to put into his work; and when, on the other
hand, his growing love for mediaeval art and for mysticism began to draw
him towards the Giottesque and even the pre-Giottesque artists, who
left out of their work all except the absolutely essential and typical
traits, Ruskin sanctified their conventionalism as the result of
preference for the merely spiritual and morally interesting portion of
the subject. The fact that the over refinement of the idealists of the
16th century ended in insipidity because it was due to a general organic
decline in the art, and that the rudeness of the conventional artists of
the 14th century possessed a certain nobility because it was merely a
momentary incapacity in a rapidly progressing art; this fact, and with
it the knowledge that the development and decline of every art is due to
certain necessities of general change, all that explains the life of any
and every art, completely escapes Ruskin on account of his explanation
by moral motives. In this way Ruskin has constructed a whole system of
artistic ethics, extremely contradictory and, as we have remarked,
bearing as great a resemblance to the text book, full of _distinguos_
and _directions of the intention_ of one of Pascal's Jesuits as a very
morally pure and noble work can bear to a very base and depraved one.
And throughout this system scattered fragmentarily throughout his
various books, every artistic merit or demerit is disposed of as a
virtuous action or a crime; the moral principle established for the
explanation of one case naturally involving the prejudgment of another
case; and the whole system explaining by moral delinquencies the
artistic inferiority of a given time or people, and, on the other hand,
attributing the moral and social ruin of a century or a nation to the
artistic abominations it had perpetrated. The arrangements of lintels
and columns, the amount of incrustation of coloured marble on to brick,
the degree to which window traceries may be legitimately attenuated and
curled, the value of Greek honeysuckle patterns as compared with Gothic
hedge-rose ornaments, all these and a thousand other questions of mere
excellence of artistic effect, are discussed on the score of their
morality or baseness, of their truthfulness, or justice, or humility;
and Ruskin's madness against any kind of cheating or deception goes
to the length, in one memorable passage in the _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_, of condemning Correggio's ceiling of St. Paolo at Parma
because, as real children might be climbing in a real vine trellise
above our heads, there is possibility of deception and of sin; whereas,
as none of us expect to see the heavens open above us, there is no
possibility of deception, and consequently no sin in Correggio's glory
of angels in the Parma Cathedral; thus absolving on the score of
morality a rather confused and sprawling composition, and condemning as
immoral one of the most graceful and childlike works of the Renaissance.
The result of this system of explaining all artistic phenomena by
ethical causes is, as we have remarked, that the real cause of any
phenomenon, the explanation afforded us by history, is entirely
overlooked or even ignominiously rejected. Thus Ruskin attributes the
decay of Gothic architecture to "one endeavour to assume, in excessive
flimsiness of tracery, the semblance of what it was not"--to its having
"sacrificed a single truth." Now the violation of the nature and
possibilities of the material, what Ruskin in ethical language calls
the endeavour to trick, was not the cause but the effect of a gradual
decline in the art. The lace work of 15th century Gothic is not a
_lie_, it is an effete form. The perfect forms had been obtained, and as
the growth of the art could not be checked, imperfect ones naturally
succeeded them; the workman had hewn enough, had diminished the stone
surfaces sufficiently, had carved the leafage as much as was compatible
with beauty; the succeeding generations of workmen continued to work,
and what happened? They hewed away too much, they diminished the stone
surface too much, they carved the leafage too deep, each generation
cutting away more and more, until the whole fabric had reached such a
degree of flimsiness that, had not the Renaissance swept its cobwebs
away, they would have been torn to shreds by the Gothic artists
themselves. An art corrupts and dies of its own vital principles, as
does every other living and changing thing, as a flower withers of its
own life: you begin by chipping, you end, as in Gothic architecture,
by chipping into nothingness. You begin with grouping: you end with
grouping, like Michelangiolo and Parmegianno, into knots and lumps;
you begin by raising your figures out of the background: you end, like
Ghiberti, by tying them on with the narrowest slip of bronze; you begin
with modulating: you end, like Raff, Brahms, and other Wagnerists, by
modulating into chaos. Art, if it lives, must grow, and if it grows it
must grow old and die. And this fact gradually, though instinctively,
beginning to be felt by all thinkers on art, Ruskin, with his theory of
moral aesthetics, could never recognize. For him the corruption of the
art is due to the moral corruption of the artist: if the artist remained
truthfully modest, the perfection of the art would continue
indefinitely.
Again, the necessity of referring all good art to morality and all bad
art to immorality, obliges Ruskin to postulate that every period which
has produced bad art has been a period of moral decay. The artistic
habits which displease him must be a direct result of a vicious way of
feeling and acting in all things: the decay of Venetian architecture and
sculpture must be distinctly referable to the decay of Venetian morality
in the 15th century; and the final corruption and ruin of the state
must be traced to the moral obliquity which caused Venetians to adopt
pseudo-classic forms in the Riva facade of the Ducal palace; moral
degradation and artistic degradation, acting and re-acting on each
other, bring about, according to Ruskin, political ruin; the iniquities
of the men who became apostates to Gothic architecture are visited upon
their distant descendants, upon the Venetians of the days of Campo
Formio. Now here again the ethical basis induces a complete historical
misconception, a misconception not only in the history of art, but also
in the history of civilization. For, just as his system of moral sin and
artistic punishment blinds Ruskin to the necessities of change and decay
in art, so, also, it prevents his seeing the inevitable necessity of
political growth and decline. Ruskin seeks the cause of the fall of
Venice in moral corruption manifested, or supposed to be manifested, in
art; but the cause of the fall of Venice must be sought elsewhere. Look
at this lagoon, this Adriatic, this Mediterranean: in the 14th century
they are the source of the greatness of the Zenos and Pisanis; three or
four hundred years later they will be the cause of the pettiness of the
Morosinis and Emos. In the present, in this time of Dandolo, into which
Ruskin has led us, it is to them that Venice owes the humiliation of
Barbarossa in the porch of St. Mark's; to them in the future will
be owed the triumph of Bonaparte and the tricolour waving from the
flagstaff of the square. For in the middle ages the sea means the
Mediterranean and the Baltic, the two great navigable, wealth-yielding
lakes, and around them arises prosperity: Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice,
Luebeck, Dantzig, Brehmen; the men who live on the shores of the
Mediterranean take the riches of the East and of India, and conquer
Greece and the islands, and grow rich; and on this strip of marshland
keep armies which can cope with the united forces of Europe. Such is the
sea of the middle ages. But the sea of modern times is the ocean; give
the means of navigating that, give to the barbarians who inhabit its
coasts just enough civilization to build a ship and steer it, and those
barbarians, yes, the boors of Frisia, the savages of England, and of
Normandy, and of Portugal, will become the masters of the world, and
Venetians and Genoese shall be their puppets, and the Mediterranean
their pond. Since to the commerce of the Mediterranean they will oppose
the commerce of the ocean, to the riches of Greece, of Asia Minor,
Persia, and Egypt, the riches of Mexico and Peru, of India and of China,
which will flow into the banks of London, of Lisbon, of Antwerp, and
which will create armies to sweep all Italy out of the field. The Ocean
has superseded the Mediterranean, the boundless the bounded; this is the
explanation of the fall of Venice, of her political torpor and her
consequent vices. It is a law of nature that the small and sheltered
spots shall suffice while civilization is small, but that as it grows it
will seek a wider field, and its original homes be abandoned. A small
country, a small sea, made Greece and Italy greatest in antiquity and
the middle ages; a small country, a narrow sea, make them smallest in
modern times. And when the first galley of Prince Henry, the first
pinnace of Amsterdam or London, nay, the first little Norman craft set
sail for St. Brandan's Isle, the fate of Venice was sealed; Lodovico
Manin, and Casanova, and Bonaparte, and Campo Formio, all that in
Venetian history can mean corruption and disgrace, all was irrevocably
fixed; the geographical chance which had raised the palaces of Venice
has also caused them to moulder; time which made has also unmade, for
life is movement and movement is change. That immorality is not the
cause but the effect of political decline is as little conceived by
Ruskin as that neither the one nor the other can be produced by artistic
degradation; in his system which makes artistic inferiority the visible
expression of moral corruption, and national misfortune its direct
punishment, there can be no room for any of the great laws of
development and decay which historical science is now beginning to
perceive. All things must be carried on upon the miraculous system of
Sunday school books, where planks of bridges give way from the cogent
mechanical reason that the little boys passing over them have just
been telling lies or stealing apples; God is for ever busy unbolting
trapdoors beneath the feet of the iniquitous and rolling stones down on
the heads of blasphemers. And this same necessity of condemning morally
a period whose artistic work in any particular line is aesthetically
worthless in Ruskin's judgment, not only leads him into the most absurd
misappreciation of the moral value of a time, but entirely forbids his
recognizing the fact that the decay of one art is frequently coincident
with, and in some measure due to, the efflorescence of another.
The independent development of painting required the decay of the
architecture of the middle ages, whose symbolical, purely decorative
tendency condemned painting to be a sort of allegorical or narrative
Arabesque; whose well defined arches might not be broken through by
daring perspective, whose delicate cornices might not enclose more than
a mere rigid and simply tinted mosaic, or mosaic-like fresco. When,
therefore, painting arose mature in the 16th century, architecture was
necessarily crumbling. But to Ruskin the 16th century, being the century
of bad architecture, is hopelessly immoral, and being immoral, its
painting, Raphael, Michel Angelo, Correggio, all except a few privileged
Venetians, must needs be swept away as so much rubbish; while the very
imperfect painting of the Giottesques, because it belongs to a time
whose morality must be high since its architecture is good, is
considered as the ideal of pictorial art. Again, Ruskin perceives that
the whole plastic art of the 18th century, architecture, sculpture, and
painting, are as bad as bad can be; the cause must necessarily be found
not in the inevitable decline of all plastic art since the Renaissance,
but in the fiendish wickedness of the 18th century, that abominable age
which first taught men the meaning of justice as distinguished from
mercy, of humanity as distinguished from charity: which first taught
us not to shrink from evil but to combat it. And thus, because
the 18th century is proved by its smirking furbelowed goddesses and
handkerchief-cravatted urns to be utterly, morally, abominable, the one
great art which flourished in this period, the glorious music of Bach,
and Gluck, and Marcello, and Mozart, must necessarily be silently carted
off to the dust heap of artistic baseness.
Thus the radical falsehood of the ethical system of aesthetics warps the
whole of Ruskin's view of the genius and evolution of art, of its
relations with national morality and political supremacy. But it does
more than this. It warps also Ruskin's view of art itself; its sophisms
force him to contradict, to stifle his own artistic instincts. For if,
as Ruskin has established, we are not permitted to love the beautiful
for its own sake, but only because it is supposed to represent a certain
moral excellence, that moral excellence must be the sole valuable
portion, and equally artistically valuable when separated from the
beautiful; while the beautiful must in itself be worthless, and
consequently dangerous. The absolutely ugly must, if it awaken virtuous
emotion, have a greater artistic value than the beautiful if it awaken
none; the macerated hermits, the lepers and cripples of the middle ages
must be artistically preferable to the healthy and beautiful athletes of
antiquity; compassion for the physically horrible is more virtuous than
the desire for the physically beautiful, therefore Ruskin would replace
the one by the other; forgetting, even as the middle ages forgot, that
the beautiful, the healthy, are the best and happiest for all of us;
that we are given sympathy with the physically evil only that we may
endure its contact long enough to transform it into the physically good:
that we compassionate disease only that we may cure it.
Thus this sophisticated sense of duty, which, applied to artistic
interests where it has no place, has merely caused injustice of all
sorts, and falsehood and unceasing contradiction: which has condemned
the artistically pure for its juxta-position with the morally impure:
which has preferred the inferior in art because it answered to the
definition of the superior in morals: which has placed Giotto above
Michel Angelo because the second could paint and the first only imagine:
which has condemned Greek art as long as it seemed beautiful and
acquitted it when it appeared ugly: which has legitimated colour art
with one verse of the bible and anathematised linear art with another:
which has so often rejected the excellent in art because it wanted the
excellent in conduct: which has come to the point of preferring that
disease and putrefaction which, in the physical world, are equivalent to
sin and corruption in the moral--this sophisticated sense of morality,
originally intended to sanction all that which in art is sanctioned by
its mere innocence and delightfulness, has at length destroyed the very
artistic system which it was to sustain. For the divine elements of
justice, and mercy, and honour, cannot be wasted in this world;
entrapped and imprisoned in order to consecrate by their presence the
already holy, rendered sterile and useless among those artistic things
with which they have no concern, they have at last sought for their
field of action, for their legitimate objects, and have burst forth,
shattering the whole edifice of art philosophy in which they were
enclosed, mere useless talismans. And it has come home to Ruskin, once
and again, that this virtue thus expended upon cornices and lintels,
upon lines and colours, while evil raged outside, is no virtue: that
this sanctified art is not holy; that, direct our intentions as we may,
think of God as much as we like, we cannot make art one whit the less
passive and egotistic; it has come home to him, and with the noble
candour of doubt which is his logical weakness and his moral strength,
he has confessed that he had never known one man really and exclusively
devoted to mere moral good, who cared for art at all. The elaborate
system of ethical aesthetics, the ingeniously far-fetched explanations of
physical beauty by moral excellence, the triumphant decision that art is
the kingdom of God, has, after all and at last, failed to redeem the
beautiful in the eyes of Ruskin. He has seen a ragged creature die of
starvation on a dung heap; and all the cathedrals of Christendom, all
the resplendent Turners and saintly Giottos in the world have seemed to
him black and hideous. He has argued and stormed, and patched up once
more his tattered theories, and talked more than ever of beauty being
virtue, and its appreciation religion, and God being in all fair
things; but all this latter talk has been vain; into the midst of art
discussions have for ever crept doubts whether art should be at all. The
placid paradise of art, whose every flower and grass blade is a generous
thought, whose every fruit is a noble action, where every bubbling of
waters and every bird's song is a hymn to the goodness of God, has
become suspicious to its own creator now that he realises by what it
is surrounded; to live in this sweet and noble impossible paradise,
where beauty is the mere visible expression of virtue, while the foul
world-swamp is stealthily being eaten into, washed away, absorbed by the
surrounding flood of hell: is this not a sin, this quiet dwelling in
holiness, and a worse sin than any being committed in the darkness and
jostle below?
In this way has Ruskin, one of the greatest thinkers on art and on
ethics, made morality sterile and art base in his desire to sanctify the
one by the other. Sterile and base, indeed, only theoretically: for the
instinct of the artist and of the moralist has ever broken out in noble
self-contradiction, in beautiful irrelevancies; in those wonderful,
almost prophetic passages which seem to make our souls more keen towards
beauty and more hardy for good. But all this is incidental, this which
is in reality Ruskin's great and useful work. He has made art more
beautiful and men better without knowing it--accidentally, without
premeditation, in words which are like the eternal truths, grand and
exquisite, which lie fragmentary and embedded in every system of
theology; the complete and systematic is worthless and even dangerous,
for it is false; the irrelevant, the contradictory, is precious, because
it is true to our better part. Ruskin has loved art instinctively,
fervently, for its own sake; but he has constantly feared lest this love
should be sinful or at least base. Like Augustine, he dreads that the
Devil maybe lurking in the beautiful sunshine; lest evil be hidden in
those beautiful shapes which distract his thoughts from higher subjects
of good and God; he trembles lest the beautiful should trouble his
senses and his fancy, and make him forget his promises to the Almighty.
He perceives that pleasure in art is more or less sensuous and selfish;
he is afraid lest some day he be called upon to account for the moments
he has not given to others, and be chastised for having permitted his
mind to follow the guidance of his senses; he trembles and repeats the
praise of God, the anathema of pride, he mumbles confused words about
"corrupt earth"--and "sinful man,"--even while looking at his works of
art, as some anchorite of old may instinctively have passed his fingers
across his beads and stammered out an _Ave_ when some sight of beauty
crossed his path and made his heart leap with unwonted pleasure. Ruskin
must tranquillize his conscience about art; he must persuade himself
that he is justified in employing his thoughts about it; and lest it be
a snare of the demon, he must make it a service of God. He must persuade
himself that all the pleasure he derives from art is the pleasure in
obeying God, in perceiving his goodness: that the pleasure he derives
from a flower is pleasure not in its curves and colours and scent, but
in its adaptation to its work, in its enjoyment of existence; that the
enjoyment he derives from a grand view is enjoyment of the kindness of
God, and the enjoyment in the sight of a noble face is enjoyment of the
expression of harmony with God's will; in short, all artistic pleasure
must become an act of adoration, otherwise, a jealous God, or a jealous
conscience, will smite him for abandoning the true altar for some golden
calf fashioned by man and inhabited by Satan. And to this constant
moralising, hallowing, nay, purifying of art, are due, as we have seen,
the greater number of Ruskin's errors; his system is false, and only
evil can spring from it; it is a pretence at a perfection which does not
exist, and which, like the pretence at the superhuman virtue of the
anchorite and mystic, must end in lamentable folly: in making men lie to
their own heart because they have sought to clothe all that is really
pure in a false garb of sanctity and have blushed at its naked reality;
because it makes a return to nature a return to sin, since what is
natural has been forbidden and what is innocent has been crookedly
obtained; because it tries to make us think we are nothing but soul, and
therefore turns us to brutes when we remember that we are also body, and
devils when we perceive that we are also reason. Because, in short, it
is a lie, and only falsehood can be born of it. For, in his constant
reference to a spiritual meaning, Ruskin has not only wasted and
sterilised our moral impulses, but has reduced art to mere foulness; in
his constant sanctifying of beauty he makes it appear impure. Above all,
in his unceasing attempt to attach a moral meaning to physical beauty,
he has lost sight of, he has denied, the great truth that all that which
is innocent is moral; that the morality of art is an independent quality
equivalent to, but separate from, the morality of action; that beauty
is the morality of the physical, as morality is the beauty of the
spiritual; that as the moral sense hallows the otherwise egotistic
relations of man to man, so also the aesthetic sense hallows the
otherwise brutish relations of man to matter; that separately but in
harmony, equally but differently, these two faculties make our lives
pure and noble. All this Ruskin has forgotten: he has made the enjoyment
of mere beauty a base pleasure, requiring a moral object to purify it,
and in so doing he has destroyed its own purifying power; he has
sanctified the already holy, and defiled with holy water, which implies
foulness, the dwelling of holiness.
This is the lesson to be derived from the attempt at noble self-delusion
which Ruskin has practised upon himself. There is not in the world that
harmony and perfection, nay, that analogy of good to good and evil to
evil for which our higher nature seeks. As we have said, there is
contradiction and anomaly: anomaly the most horrible, since our logical
sense must accept it, and our moral sense cannot: anomaly of good
springing from evil, and evil from good, of pollution of the noble and
hallowing of the foul by the force of inevitable sequence. There is also
isolation of one sort of good from the other, and clashing of their
interests. All this there is, and against it all our moral sense must
for ever protest, and against it, whether free in our endeavour or
merely pushed on by the universal necessity, we must struggle. We
must seek for ever to resolve the discord between good and good, to
disentangle the meshes of good and evil, to destroy the dreadful anomaly
of things. But we can do so, however partially, we can really wish to
do so, only if we have the courage to see that the lamentable discord
and the horrible tangle do exist: only if we do not shrink from the
battlefield of reality into an enervating Capua of moral idealism. And
thus we should admit that only morality is really moral, and only virtue
really virtuous; that physical beauty intrinsically possesses but an
aesthetic value quite separate from all moral value; that above it must
always remain a more generous world of feeling and endeavour. If we do
not shrink from this painful truth we shall see that physical beauty and
its egotistic enjoyment have yet a moral value of their own: the value
of being, in the lives of others, absolute pleasure, the giving of which
is positive good. For in this world all is not completed when we have
destroyed evil; it must be replaced by good. We must all of us work, but
we must work in different ways. One half of us are the destroyers of
evil, the wrestlers with all that is wrong in itself or begets wrong,
falsehood, injustice, disease, misery; sent to extirpate the bad,
laboriously to weed it out blade by blade, or boldly to plough and burn
it up by the sheaf, the field, the acre. But when this half of active
mankind has done its work, what would remain? A mere joyless desert of
painless vacuity; and the other half of the workers must come and sow
and plant absolute good, positive joy in this redeemed life soil; nay,
even while the work of destruction is far from completed, and most of
all, perhaps, then, do we require that in the very shadow of the yet
deep-rooted evil, the little tufts of good should rise up, and console
and strengthen us with their sight and their scent. And of all these
kinds of egotistic good which we must needs sow while evil is being
cleared away, art is one of the noblest and most necessary; and woe
betide those who, having the power of creating beauty, would leave their
allotted work and join the destroyers of falsehood and of evil. The
amount of absolute good in the world is comparatively small, and we must
seek to increase it for ever; but increased it cannot be except by the
full employment of our activities, and our activities can be fully
employed only in their own proper sphere. In every artist there is a
man, and the moral perfection of the man is more important than the
artistic perfection of the artist; but, in as far as the artist is an
artist, he must be satisfied to do well in his art. For, though art has
no moral meaning, it has a moral value; art is happiness, and to bestow
happiness is to create good.